by a predominance of sensibility over principle, an excess of what
Coleridge called the spiritual over what he called the moral part of man.
A nature built on quicksands, an organization of nerve languid or
tempestuous with occasion, a soul falling and soaring, now subject to
ecstasies and now to remorses--such, it is supposed, and on no small
induction of actual instances, is the appropriate constitution of the
poet. Mobility, absolute and entire destitution of principle properly so
called, capacity for varying the mood indefinitely rather than for
retaining and keeping up one moral gesture or resolution through all
moods: this, say the theorists, is the essential thing in the structure of
the artist. Against the truth of this, however, as a maxim of universal
application, the character of Milton, as well as that of Wordsworth after
him, is a remarkable protest. Were it possible to place before the
theorists all the materials which exist for judging of Milton's personal
disposition as a young man, without exhibiting to them at the same time
the actual and early proofs of his poetical genius, their conclusion, were
they true to their theory, would necessarily be that the basis of his
nature was too solid and immovable, the platform of personal aims and
aspirations over which his thoughts moved and had footing too fixed and
firm, to permit that he should have been a poet. Nay, whosoever, even
appreciating Milton as a poet, shall come to the investigation of his
writings armed with that preconception of the poetical character which is
sure to be derived from an intimacy with the character of Shakespeare will
hardly escape some feeling of the same kind. Seriousness, we repeat, a
solemn and even austere demeanour of mind, was the characteristic of
Milton even in his youth. And the outward manifestation of this was a life
of pure and devout observance. This is a point that ought not to be
avoided, or dismissed in mere general language; for he who does not lay
stress on this knows not and loves not Milton. Accept, then, by way of
more particular statement, his own remarkable words in justifying himself
against an innuendo of one of his adversaries in later life, reflecting on
the tenor of his juvenile pursuits and behaviour. "A certain niceness of
nature," he says, "an honest haughtiness and self-esteem either of what I
was, or what I might be (which let envy call pride), and lastly that
modesty whereof, though not in the title-page, yet here I may be excused
to make some beseeming profession, all these, uniting the supply of their
natural aid together, kept me still above those low descents of mind
beneath which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable
and unlawful prostitutions." Fancy, ye to whom the moral frailty of genius
is a consolation, or to whom the association of virtue with youth and
Cambridge is a jest--fancy Milton, as this passage from his own pen
describes him at the age of twenty-three, returning to his father's house
from the university, full of its accomplishments and its honours, an
auburn-haired youth, beautiful as the Apollo of a northern clime, and that
beautiful body the temple of a soul pure and unsoiled. Truly, a son for a
mother to take to her arms with joy and pride!
Connected with this austerity of character, discernible in Milton even in
his youth, may be noted also, as indeed it is noted in the passage just
cited, a haughty yet modest self-esteem and consciousness of his own
powers. Throughout all Milton's works there may be discerned a vein of
this noble egotism, this unbashful self-assertion. Frequently, in arguing
with an opponent, or in setting forth his own views on any subject of
discussion, he passes, by a very slight topical connexion, into an account
of himself, his education, his designs, and his relations to the matter in
question; and this sometimes so elaborately and at such length, that the
impression is as if he said to his readers, "Besides all my other
arguments, take this also as the chief and conclusive argument, that it is
_I_, a man of such and such antecedents, and with such and such powers to
perform far higher work than you see me now engaged in, who affirm and
maintain this." In his later years Milton evidently believed himself to
be, if not the greatest man in England, at least the greatest writer, and
one whose _egomet dixi_ was entitled to as much force in the intellectual
commonwealth as the decree of a civil magistrate is invested with in the
order of civil life. All that he said or wrote was backed in his own
consciousness by a sense of the independent importance of the fact that it
was he, Milton, who said or wrote it; and often, after arguing a point for
some time on a footing of ostensible equality with his readers, he seems
suddenly to stop, retire to the vantage-ground of his own thoughts, and
bid his readers follow him thither, if they would see the whole of that
authority which his words had failed to express.
Such, we say, is Milton's habit in his later writings. In his early life,
of course, the feeling which it shows existed rather as an undefined
consciousness of superior power, a tendency silently and with satisfaction
to compare his own intellectual measure with that of others, a resolute
ambition to be and to do something great. Now we cannot help thinking
that it will be found that this particular form of self-esteem goes along
with that moral austerity of character which we have alleged to be
discernible in Milton even in his youth, rather than with that temperament
of varying sensibility which is, according to the general theory, regarded
as characteristic of the poet. Men of this latter type, as they vary in
the entire mood of their mind, vary also in their estimate of themselves.
No permanent consciousness of their own destiny, or of their own worth in
comparison with others, belongs to them. In their moods of elevation they
are powers to move the world; but, while the impulse that has gone forth
from them in one of those moods may be still thrilling its way onward in
wider and wider circles through the hearts of myriads they have never
seen, they, the fountains of the impulse, the spirit being gone from them,
may be sitting alone in the very spot and amid the ashes of their triumph,
sunken and dead, despondent and self-accusing. It requires the evidence of
positive results, the assurance of other men's praises, the visible
presentation of effects which they cannot but trace to themselves, to
convince such men that they are or can do anything. Whatever
manifestations of egotism, whatever strokes of self-assertion come from
such men, come in the very burst and phrenzy of their passing
resistlessness. The calm, deliberate, and unshaken knowledge of their own
superiority is not theirs. True, Shakespeare, the very type, if rightly
understood, of this class of minds, is supposed in his Sonnets to have
predicted, in the strongest and most deliberate terms, his own immortality
as a poet. It could be proved, however, were this the place for such an
investigation, that the common interpretation of those passages of the
Sonnets which are supposed to supply this trait in the character of
Shakespeare is nothing more nor less than a false reading of a very subtle
meaning which the critics have missed. Those other passages of the Sonnets
which breathe an abject melancholy and discontentment with self, which
exhibit the poet as "cursing his fate," as "bewailing his outcast state,"
as looking about abasedly among his literary contemporaries, envying the
"art" of one, and the "scope" of another, and even wishing sometimes that
the very features of his face had been different from what they were and
like those of some he knew, are, in our opinion, of far greater
autobiographic value.
Nothing of this kind is to be found in Milton. As a Christian, indeed,
humiliation before God was a duty the meaning of which he knew full well;
but, as a man moving among other men, he possessed, in that moral
seriousness and stoic scorn of temptation which characterized him, a
spring of ever-present pride, dignifying his whole bearing among his
fellows, and at times arousing him to a kingly intolerance. In short,
instead of that dissatisfaction with self which we trace as a not
unfrequent feeling with Shakespeare, we find in Milton, even in his early
youth, a recollection firm and habitual that he was one of those servants
to whom God had entrusted the stewardship of ten talents. In that very
sonnet, for example, written on his twenty-third birthday, in which he
laments that he had as yet achieved so little, his consolation is that the
power of achievement was still indubitably within him--
"All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye."
And what was that special mode of activity to which Milton, still in the
bloom and seed-time of his years, had chosen to dedicate the powers of
which he was so conscious? He had been destined by his parents for the
Church; but this opening into life he had definitively and deliberately
abandoned. With equal decision he renounced the profession of the Law; and
it does not seem to have been long after the conclusion of his career at
the university when he renounced the prospects of professional life
altogether. His reasons for this, which are to be gathered from various
passages of his writings, seem to have resolved themselves into a jealous
concern for his own absolute intellectual freedom. He had determined, as
he says, "to lay up, as the best treasure and solace of a good old age,
the honest liberty of free speech from his youth;" and neither the Church
nor the Bar of England, at the time when he formed that resolution, was a
place where he could hope to keep it. For a man so situated, the
alternative, then as now, was the practice or profession of literature. To
this, therefore, as soon as he was able to come to a decision on the
subject, Milton had implicitly, if not avowedly, dedicated himself. To
become a great writer, and, above all, a great poet; to teach the English
language a new strain and modulation; to elaborate and surrender over to
the English nation works that would make it more potent and wise in the
age that was passing, and more memorable and lordly in the ages to come:
such was the form which Milton's ambition had assumed when, laying aside
his student's garb, he went to reside under his father's roof.
Nor was this merely a choice of necessity, the reluctant determination of
a young soul "Church-outed by the prelates" and disgusted with the chances
of the Law. Milton, in the Church, would certainly have been such an
archbishop, mitred or unmitred, as England has never seen; and the very
passage of such a man across the sacred floor would have trampled into
timely extinction much that has since sprung up amongst us to trouble and
perplex, and would have modelled the ecclesiasticism of England into a
shape that the world might have gazed at with no truant glance backward
to the splendours of the Seven Hills. And, doubtless, even amid the
traditions of the Law, such a man would have performed the feats of a
Samson, albeit of a Samson in chains. An inward prompting, therefore, a
love secretly plighted to the Muse, and a sweet comfort and delight in her
sole society, which no other allurement, whether of profit or pastime,
could equal or diminish,--this, less formally perhaps, but as really as
care for his intellectual liberty, or distaste for the established
professions of his time, determined Milton's early resolution as to his
future way of life. On this point it will be best to quote his own words.
"After I had," he says, "from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence
and care of my father (whom God recompense!), been exercised to the
tongues and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and
teachers both at home and at the schools, it was found that, whether ought
was imposed upon me by them that had the overlooking or betaken to of mine
own choice, in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly
this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to
live." The meaning of which sentence is that Milton, before his
three-and-twentieth year, knew himself to be a poet.
He knew this, he says, by "certain vital signs" discernible in what he had
already written. What were those "vital signs," those proofs indubitable
to Milton that he had the art and faculty of a poet? We need but refer the
reader for the answer to those smaller poetical compositions of Milton,
both in English and in Latin, which survive as specimens of his earliest
Muse. Of these, some three or four which happen to be specially
dated--such as the _Elegy on the Death of a Fair Infant_, written in 1626,
or the author's eighteenth year; the well-known _Hymn on the Morning of
Christ's Nativity_, written in 1629, when the author was just twenty-one;
and the often-quoted _Lines on Shakespeare_, written not much later--may
be cited as convenient materials from which anyone who would convince
himself minutely of Milton's youthful vocation to poetry, rather than to
anything else, may derive proofs on that head. Here will be found power of
the most rare and beautiful conception, choice of words the most exact and
exquisite, the most perfect music and charm of verse. Above all, here will
be found that ineffable something--call it imagination or what we
will--wherein lies the intimate and ineradicable peculiarity of the poet:
the art to work on and on for ever in a purely ideal element, to chase and
marshal airy nothings according to a law totally unlike that of rational
association, never hastening to a logical end like the schoolboy when on
errand, but still lingering within the wood like the schoolboy during
holiday. This peculiar mental habit, nowhere better described than by
Milton himself when he speaks of verse
"Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out
With wanton heed and giddy cunning,"
is so characteristic of the poetical disposition that, though in most of
the greatest poets, as, for example, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare in his
dramas, Chaucer, and almost all the ancient Greek poets, it is not
observable in any extraordinary degree, chiefly because in them the
element of direct reference to human life and its interests had fitting
preponderance, yet it may be affirmed that he who, tolerating or admiring
these poets, does not relish also such poetry as that of Spenser, Keats,
and Shakespeare in his minor pieces, but complains of it as wearisome and
sensuous, is wanting in a portion of the genuine poetic taste.
There was but one "vital sign" the absence of which in Milton could,
according to any theory of the poetical character, have begotten doubts in
his own mind, or in the minds of his friends, whether poetry was his
peculiar and appropriate function. The single source of possible doubt on
this head could have been no other than that native austerity of feeling
and temper, that real though not formal Puritanism of heart and
intellect, which we have noticed as distinguishing Milton from his youth
upward. The poet, it is said in these days, when, by psychologizing a man,
it is supposed we can tell what course of life he is fit for--the poet
ought to be universally sympathetic; he ought to hate nothing, despise
nothing. And a notion equivalent to this, though by no means so
articulately expressed, was undoubtedly prevalent in Milton's own time. As
the Puritans, on the one hand, had set their faces against all those
practices of profane singing, dancing, masquing, theatre-going, and the
like, in which the preservation of the spirit of the arts was supposed to
be involved, so the last party in the world from which the reputed
devotees of the arts in those days would have expected a poet to arise was
that of the Puritans. Even in Shakespeare, and much more in Ben Jonson,
Beaumont and Fletcher, and other poets of the Elizabethan age, may be
traced evidences of an instinctive enmity to that Puritanical mode of
thinking which was then on the increase in English society, and in the
triumph of which those great minds foresaw the proscription of their craft
and their pleasures. When Sir Toby says to Malvolio, "Dost thou think,
because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" and when
the Clown adds, "Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth
too," it is the Knight and the Clown on the one side against Malvolio the
Puritan on the other. That the defence of the festive in this passage is
not borne by more respectable personages than the two who speak is indeed
a kind of indication that Shakespeare's personal feelings with regard to
the austere movement which he saw gathering around him were by no means so
deep or bitter as to discompose him; but, if his profounder soul could
behold such things with serenity, and even pronounce them good, they
assuredly met with enough of virulence and invective among his lesser
contemporaries. That literary crusade against the Puritans, as canting,
sour-visaged, mirth-forbidding, art-abhorring religionists, which came to
its height at the time when Butler wrote his _Hudibras_, and Wycherley his
plays, was already hot when the wits of King James's days used to assemble
after the theatre, in their favourite taverns; and if, sallying out after
one of their merry evenings in their most favourite tavern of all, the
Mermaid in Bread Street, those assembled poets and dramatists had gone in
search of the youth who was likeliest to be the poet of the age then
beginning, they certainly would not have gone to that modest residence in
the same street where the son of the Puritanic scrivener, then preparing
for College, was busy over his books. Nay, if Ben Jonson, the last
twenty-nine years of whose life coincided with the first twenty-nine of
Milton's, had followed the young student from the house where he was born
in Bread Street to his rooms at Cambridge, and had there become acquainted
with him and looked over his early poetical exercises, it is probable
enough that, while praising them so far, he would have constituted himself
the organ of that very opinion as to the requisites of the poetical
character which we are now discussing, and declared, in some strong phrase
or other, that the youth would have been all the more hopeful as a poet if
he had had a little more of the _bon vivant_ in his constitution.
This, then, is a point of no little importance, involving as it does the
relations of Milton as a poet to the age in which he lived, that splendid
age of Puritan mastery in England which came between the age of
Shakespeare and Elizabeth and the age of Dryden and the second Charles.
Milton was _the_ poet of that intermediate era; that his character was
such as we have described it made him only the more truly a representative
of all that was then deepest in English society; and, in inquiring,
therefore, in what manner Milton's austerity as a man affected his art as
a poet, we are, at the same time, investigating the _rationale_ of that
remarkable fact in the history of English literature, the interpolation of
so original and isolated a development as the Miltonic poems between the
inventive luxuriousness of the Elizabethan epoch and the witty
licentiousness that followed the Restoration.
First, then, it was not _humour_ that came to the rescue, in Milton's
case, to help him out in those respects wherein, according to the theory
in question, the strictness and austerity of his own disposition would
have injured his capacity to be a poet. There are and have been men as
strict and austere as he, who yet, by means of this quality of humour,
have been able to reconcile themselves to much in human life lying far
away from, and even far beneath, the sphere of their own practice and
conscientious liking. As Pantagruel, the noble and meditative, endured and
even loved those immortal companions of his, the boisterous and profane
Friar John, and the cowardly and impish Panurge, so these men, remaining
themselves with all rigour and punctuality within the limits of sober and
exemplary life, are seen extending their regards to the persons and the
doings of a whole circle of reprobate Falstaffs, Pistols, Clowns, and Sir
Toby Belches. They cannot help it. They may and often do blame themselves
for it; they wish that, in their intercourse with the world, they could
more habitually turn the austere and judicial side of their character to
the scenes and incidents that there present themselves, simply saying of
each "That is right and worthy" or "That is wrong and unworthy," and
treating it accordingly. But they break down in the trial. Suddenly some
incident presents itself which is not only right but clumsy, or not only
wrong but comic, and straightway the austere side of their character
wheels round to the back, and judge, jury, and witnesses are convulsed
with untimely laughter. It was by no means so with Milton. As his critics
have generally remarked, he had little of humour, properly so called, in
his composition. His laughter is the laughter of scorn. With one unvarying
judicial look he confronted the actions of men, and, if ever his tone
altered as he uttered his judgments, it was only because something roused
him to a pitch of higher passion. Take, as characteristic, the following
passage, in which he replies to the taunt of an opponent who had asked
where _he_, the antagonist of profane amusements, had procured that
knowledge of theatres and their furniture which certain allusions in one
of his books showed him to possess:--
"Since there is such necessity to the hearsay of a tire, a periwig,
or a vizard, that plays must have been seen, what difficulty was
there in that, when in the colleges so many of the young divines, and
those in next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the
stage, writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and
dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting
the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having
to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies, with their grooms and
mademoiselles? There, whilst they acted and overacted, among other
young scholars, I was a spectator: they thought themselves gallant
men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they
mispronounced, and I misliked; and, to make up the atticism, they
were out, and I hissed."--_Apology for Smectymnuus._
Who can doubt that to a man to whom such a scene as this presented itself
in a light so different from that in which a Shakespeare would have viewed
it Friar John himself, if encountered in the real world, would have been
simply the profane and unendurable wearer of the sacred garb, Falstaff
only a foul and grey-haired iniquity, Pistol but a braggart and coward,
and Sir Toby Belch but a beastly sot?